Posts categorized "Music Business"

REBOOT Announcement I’m happy to announce the release of my new album electronica REBOOT. I’ve been working on this project on and off for over 2 years. In this and future posts, I’ll share some behind-the-scenes information on the project and DIY music publishing that I hope will save you some time.

Get Reboot Now I decided to currently offer REBOOT using a “pay what you will” model. Although the suggested pricing is $6 for the 7 song album + digital booklet and $1 for singles, you can name your own price including specifying $0 for free downloads. You can download/buy from my Bandcamp page - http://markmosher.bandcamp.com.

About Reboot First let me say that I think you fellow electronic music artists are going to enjoy the album. It’s loaded with complex layers and lots of synth “ear candy”. The album was composed, performed, produced, and mastered using Ableton Live and a Windows Laptop. With the exception of vocals, ALL instruments are virtual – in other words the album is 99.9% digital. Most songs are made up of around 30 tracks.

Phased Plan for Digital Distribution I decided to distribute digital only for now and do a phased release and slowly build up distribution channels. This will allow me to stay focused on music and not get completely bogged down in managing distribution. In addition to launching a landing page on a publishing site I wanted to integrate links into www.markmoshermusic.com/music.htm so I could build equity on my own site and centralize distribution.

Bandcamp Publishing Solution After much experimentation with various social media music distribution sites, I settled on Bandcamp for phase 1. I really like Bandcamp. It focuses more on distribution than trying to compete with social media sites. Instead it offers many sharing options that allow visitors to spread the word. It simply makes publishing a breeze. It’s very simple and clean. Integrating with PayPal is a snap. It also has some nice widgets that allowed me to use Bandamp for heavy lifting on the music page on my site.

Pay What You Will Bandcamp also supports the top high-rez audio formats and offers a flexible system that allows for many options for payment. Pay what you will, minimum payments, free but force an email address and more.

More on Self-Publishing… If you’ve never self-published, there are a tone of little details behind the scenes – tagging, ISRC codes... I’ll post more on this in the future.

The January 2008 edition of Wired Magazine has some articles you might find of interest.

First is an article called The "The Fall and Rise of Music" by David Byrne of Talking Head fame. He's been in business a long time and offers some interesting insight into the evolution of the music industry and new models for selling music.

The same issue has another article "The Radiohead Revolution" where David Byrne interviews Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke about their "pay-what-you-will" digital download model.